Transcript

I mean, coming from SAG-AFTRA members. I mean, I’ve been, you know, been doing this 22 years. We know what this thing is we get to do. And when it works and when it doesn’t work so well. Thank you.

To the nominees, not just in this category, but so many – there were so many fierce performances this year! [applause] I mean, the choices and the characters that so many people have made, it really shines a great light on this – this – this bull ride that we take called “acting.”

I mean, I’ve been able to recently find some characters that I could humble myself to their humanities, and then get feverishly drunk on their obsessions. And that’s really been fun for me.

“Dallas Buyers Club,” Ron Woodroof. We got an important story about an important time in America and the world, people who had HIV, how were they dealt with, how is it dealt with now. It’s still very relevant.

You’ve got Ron Woodroof, a guy had the clearest obsession of all! “I’m obsessed to stay alive.” He was. Given 30 days to live, he goes on and lives seven more years.

There’s a magic spot – we all know it is – there’s a magic place that we, as actors, can get or at least strive to get to. And you know we always don’t get there. But, boy, when we touch it, it’s magic. When you’re seeing the character from the inside out, when you’re walking out every day and everything you see, smell and touch and observe is coming through that character into you, and it’s making sense, and you’re the subject, you’re the “I,” you’re first-person seeing it through that character’s eyes. That doesn’t always happen.

But, boy, when it does, and it feels like they could put a blindfold you on you and put you in a spaceship and take you to Neptune, and you could hop off on the planet. And they’d better have the sprockets rolling when you get off that spaceship, because you are going to behave as your man. THAT is a glorious feeling! [applause]

There’s a man I met 20 years ago. He escaped Russia, and was not even a carpenter: built a 17-foot boat and sailed across the Atlantic. For decades, he held the world record for smallest-vessel-single-man-sailed across the Atlantic. He told me this. He said: “A genius can be anybody he wants to, but the genius is always one person at a time.”

So, that, I say, that’s what we get to do, isn’t it? Be one man, one woman, one human at a time. When we do it well, let’s keep doing that, just keep living. [applause]